The TSF Site Needs Help

In 2010 I will be the chairman of the Troy Strawberry Festival. How I learned about that honor is a story for a different day. What I find interesting at this point is that there is so little ‘web presence’ for the event. Google Strawberry Festival. This is the SERP as of today:

What’s nice about this result is that Troy ranks higher then the Texas event. This despite the fact that the Troy event doesn’t even have the keywords in the domain name. And this is the SERP when you add the keyword Troy:

Clearly Troy helps. That’s not too surprising.
The StrawberryFestival.com domain name is owned by the Poteet Strawberry Festival in Poteet Texas. The StrawberryFestival.org domain name is owned by the Grove City Strawberry Festival in Grove City California. Both events are large. The California event looks very large and is held on four days in May. The Texas event is a three day event in April. The California event (.org) has a good search results page and reflects a well structured and stable site. The Texas event is even better. StrawberryFestival.net is owned by a gentleman in Florida and I suspect is associated with the Florida event (currently using the FLStrawberryFestival.com domain name).

My recommendations (for whatever it is worth) is:
1. Secure the TroyStrawberryFestival.com domain name.
2. Appoint someone to build out the web site with timely and frequent content.
3. Require each event leader to provide regular and frequent content to the above person.
4. Build a social marketing aspect to the web site.
5. Develop a deliberate web marketing campaign to drive the value of the web site up and make it valuable property for local merchants.

The Dayton Daily News is an untapped resource. Because of how Cox manages their web properties, the DDN site is a great lever to greater exposure.

Other strategies is to create a marketing keyword. I already tag Flickr content with TSFSI. If you Google TSFSI you are going to find content for the soccer tournament. The opportunity is even greater for the larger Festival.